66 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A much needed, and enjoyable, book about GNU Make, May 16, 2005
This review is from: Managing Projects with GNU Make (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)
I write a lot of Makefiles. In fact, I write a lot of Makefiles using
GNU Make and finally there's a book to complement the Free Software
Foundation's excellent GNU Make user guide. Also, finally, O'Reilly
has updated what must have been the worst book in their entire line
up: "Managing Projects with make"
Robert Mecklenburg's "Managing Project with GNU Make" is a must have
book if you end up writing or maintaining GNU Make Makefiles with more
than 100 lines in them. You don't need it if all your Makefiles are
created using ./configure, but every serious Makefile hacker should
read this book.
That's not to say that the book is perfect. Far from it. I was
annoyed while reading the book by the author's frequent, annoying
small errors (e.g. on p. 58 the author states that CURDIR contains the
argument of --include-dir when in fact it contains the full path of
the directory where GNU Make is looking for Makefiles) and over use of
the $(eval) (more on $(eval) below). In fact, the number of errors in
the book were surprising for an O'Reilly tome and it looks like the
edition could use a good proof-reading. I've sent in a detailed list
to the O'Reilly folks but nothing appears on their Errata web site
yet.
The section that describes the new $(eval) and $(value) functions
available since GNU Make 3.80 is excellent (pp. 82-86). And the book
contains a good discussion of the problems inherent in using recursive
make (pp. 108-116) and how to implement a non-recursive make
(pp. 117-123). The book is worth its cover price just for these three
sections.
Where I think the book really goes off track is in trying to shoehorn
too many things into GNU Make. Specifically, the author talks quite a
bit about ANT and spends an entire chapter showing how to replace ANT
with GNU Make. I found some of the things he thinks are wrong with
ANT to be silly: for example, "The Ant <mkdir> task does not invoke
the underlying mkdir program for your system. Instead, it executes
the Java mkdir() method of the java.io.File class. This may or may
not be what you expect." Sure, if you are a GNU Make user you'd
expect that mkdir is mkdir the command; Java programms a probably
quite familiar with java.io.File and are likely not to be confused. I
think the book would have been better without this chapter.
The section on parallel and distributed Make is really light.
Although this section describes the issues associated with trying to
parallelize a build, it wold have been nice to have a description of
distcc.
There are only two books on GNU Make worth reading: this one and the
FSF's GNU Make manual. As I was reading Robert Mecklenburg's book I
couldn't help finding myself comparing it with the FSF manual (which
is the same as the info files installed with GNU Make).
Firstly, this isn't a good book to learn GNU Make from. Although Part
I of the book explains the basics of GNU Make with many examples, the
book does not provide a complete reference to GNU Make's language (for
example, Appendix A's list of command-line options is incomplete), and
has odd digressions (the section describing how += works (pp. 44-45)
makes it sound much more complex than it is) and ommissions (the
section on "Target- and Pattern-Specific Variables" (pp. 50-51) makes
no mention of pattern-specific variables at all).
Secondly, the author lurves the $(eval) function added in GNU Make
3.80. There are three problems with this: GNU Make 3.79.1 is commonly
seen in practice and doesn't contain $(eval), the implementation of
$(eval) in 3.80 has some bugs in it and the author uses $(eval) too
much, using it when it isn't needed. This hammer to crack a nut use
of $(eval) is annoying because it obscures simpler ways of writing
Makefiles.
If you get this book and know a thing or two about Make jump directly
to Part II and read about benchmarking of Make, the really useful
debugging ideas and recursive/non-recursive make. Skip back to Part I
when you've got some time on your hands and need to have a fun read;
you'll know most of the material but there are gems worth finding.
When you are done with that have a good laugh about the "extreme Make"
in Appendix B. Skip over the description of the Linux Kernel
Makefile: it seems like it might be interesting, but isn't.
If you can only buy one book about GNU Make, then buy the Free
Software Foundation's GNU Make user guide. You'll be supporting the
people who actually created GNU Make, and you'll get a complete
reference to it. If you've already got the FSF book, then get Robert
Mecklenburg's excellent "advanced user's guide".
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible, December 29, 2009
This review is from: Managing Projects with GNU Make (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)
I have almost no experience with writing makefiles. All I've done is edit existing makefiles until they work without really knowing what I am doing. I bought this book to fill in my knowledge. There seems to be a lot of information in this book. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information not in the book that makes it difficult to follow his examples. For example, on p. 5 there is text in there that makes up the file 'lexer.l', but the author doesn't say this. He simply puts that text on the page, calls it a 'scanner', then I see something called 'lexer.l' in the makefile he is using. It took me a while to figure out that the 10 or so lines of text he called a 'scanner' was in fact 'lexer.l'.
The author continually does this for at least the first 20 pages, where it took me hours to figure out what files he used and what were supposed to be in the files. This should have only taken me as long as it takes to type the files into the computer. There are supposed to be five files: counter.h lexer.h count_words.c counter.c and lexer.l. I don't understand why the auther cannot simply say "the text below define *.*", then write it out, instead of making the reader guess at what he is talking about. On page 20 he talks about refactoring the 'main' program, but what he really means is creating a new file called 'counter.c' not rewriting the 'main' program in 'count_words.c'.
It's too bad the author has decided to write in such an ambiguous style because his explainations of make features are very good, unfortunately, I can't verify this using his examples because he thinks his readers can read his mind.
The frustration caused by this lack of explicitness for his examples is the reason I give this book one star. Instead of simply using his examples, I have to figure out what the heck he is talking about, then try to use them the way he is. I'm spending orders of magnitudes more on this guessing than I am on learning make, which is why this book sucks. I'm only on page 20 and all ready I don't really want to use this book. I guess if you all ready know how to use make and just want a reference, this book is probably fine as you have plenty of your own examples to follow. But I do not.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Does what it should do, July 1, 2007
This review is from: Managing Projects with GNU Make (Nutshell Handbooks) (Paperback)
I've used make and makefiles for many years. In my current product development there was suddenly a need for a little more than the standard make knowledge. For most Open Source tools there is a good O'reilly book, so I grabbed this one from the store.
This book exactly fitted to my need. It does what it should do, it explain make, and nothing more. Already after part 1 I got useful new bits of information. Nothing major, just small "ah-ha, that's how the do it"'s.
The book is structured ok (I felt it could be structured better, but have no suggestion how). It consists of basic and advanced parts. The basic part will cover rules, variables, functions and commands. The advanced will talk about large project, C++, Java, examples and some debugging.
All the basic concepts chapters were pretty good. Somehow I didn't enjoy the advanced chapters too much. I didn't feel I was learning much new things there. The Java chapter was a little odd. I've not met any Java developer who currently uses make, most have switched to ant quite some time ago (book was 2004, so might be changed in the fourth edition). The example makefile of the book was somehow not interesting. The second example makefile was the linux kernel. This was more interesting, but it didn't go into too much details.
All in all, I found it a good book. It gave me exactly what I needed. Somehow the writing style was a little dry. I couldn't really point my finger on what made it so.
I'll give it 3 stars. Not because it's not good, but exactly because it's a good book. However, it didn't give me something extra, which I always hope a book gives me.
Recommended when needing to know more about Make :)
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